Economics Articles at Brownstone Institute feature opinion and analysis of the global economy including impacts on social life, public health, free trade, liberty, and policy. All Brownstone Institute Economics articles are translated into multiple languages.
Let there be no mystery as to why the public has lost trust in government, public health, media, and virtually every other official institution. Even as Americans have been pillaged and had their foundational rights violated by governments, the people on the inside have done very well for themselves within this tangled web of graft and corruption. They have every intention to forever block curious journalists from knowing more.
The US economy is freighted down with debt and it is also short of labor, riddled with non-productive speculation and financial engineering and starved for productive investment. Taken together, those malign forces were more than enough to slow the underlying growth of the US economy to a crawl.
The proposed Nature Restoration Law, one of the main components of the European Commission’s “Green Deal,” would require 20 percent of allegedly degraded EU land and sea to be “restored” by 2030. A modified version of the proposal which was already rejected in the parliament’s Environment Committee would have raised this figure even to 30 percent.
While natural neighborhoods can be wonderful supportive safe places, unnatural neighborhoods will exacerbate the problems that do occur in more tightly knit communities. Self-surveillance (if not actual real surveillance) and a sense of trepidation about leaving the comfortable confines can lead to a feeling of isolation from the larger world. In an FMC, that isolation could be seen as being not organic but ordered from on high, creating a mental box that can dwarf intellectual and emotional growth – in other words, a captive personality.
Recent history and current events clearly demonstrate that it is no longer a question of “is this possible” but a question of “when.” We the People must hold our public servants accountable. We must not let them strip us of our freedoms by complying when asked, “Papers, please.” We must not let division creep in under the guise of public health when We the People are healthier together. Vax passes must not pass.
With no commensurate increase in the demand for money, the expansion in money supply created by American money-printing leads to all existing dollars buying fewer goods than before the money-printing. Nobody sends a bill: the tax just happens, with every clank of the government printing press. Doubling the amount of money in circulation via the printing press, and then giving the printed money to the government to buy stuff with, is basically the same as the government taxing half of private-sector income and buying stuff with it.
Banks would then become instruments of political persecution and totalitarian groupthink instead of institutions devoted to the provision of banking services to the citizenry at large. The price of political dissent would become far too high for many citizens. The public square would quickly degenerate into an echo-chamber of opinions approved by the banking establishment.
It’s well known that employment has impacts on not just an individual’s economic outlook, but their health as well. The idea that we could have somehow suppressed the economy in favor of preventing mortality and impact to health was a false tradeoff. The cost of destroying livelihoods has impacts to health and life expectancy.
Corporatism abolishes the competitive dynamic of competitive capitalism and replaces it with cartels run by oligarchs. It reduces growth and prosperity. It is invariably corrupt. It promises efficiency but yields only graft. It expands the gaps between rich and poor and creates and entrenches deep fissures between the rulers and ruled. It dispenses with localism, religious particularism, rights of families, and aesthetic traditionalism. It also ends in violence.
Stakeholder capitalism inevitably creates a tyranny of minorities, and especially highly ideological minorities (because a shared ideology reduces the cost of organizing). Minority stakeholders will succeed in expropriating majority ones. Minority tyranny is the big problem with democratic politics. Extending it to vast swathes of economic life is a nightmare.
If you haven’t changed your thinking over the last three years, you are a prophet, indifferent, or asleep. Much has been revealed and much has changed. To meet these challenges, we must do so with our eyes wide open. The greatest threats to human liberty today are not the ones of the past and they elude easy ideological categorization. Further, we have to admit that in many ways the plain human desire to live a fulfilling life in freedom has been subverted. If we want our freedoms back, we need to have a full understanding of the frightening challenges before us.
